Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni

A frontal approach and experiments that often push materials and technical resources to the limits of their strength, scale and movement: the works of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni challenge the ever more obvious power of machines and “modes of existence” that are taking shape separately from us human beings, sometimes without our being able to see or inhabit them.

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have recently exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Casino Luxembourg and the Santa Fe and Moscow biennials.

This project was selected and supported by the sponsorship committee of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques.

With support from DICRéAM (Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / CNC, aide à la production) and Conseil régional & DRAC Rhône-Alpes as part of the Support for Audiovisual and Digital Creation [SCAN]

Works

La vie moderne

La Mémoire de masse, Création Biennale 2015

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni pursue their long-term work, The Unmanned, at the Lyon Biennale. It is a series of films telling a non-human story of technology, and telling it backwards. La Mémoire de Masse (“secondary storage” – literally, “mass memory”) traces a discrete history of technology by exploring the invention of modern calculation and its automation, and takes place in 1834 in Lyon during the silk workers’ rebellion (la révolte des Canuts). As the artists have explained, “These riots, known as the ’Bloody Week’ were a reaction to the effects of automation in the workplace, when Jacquard looms were introduced. The looms’ punched cards were early ’storage systems’ that enabled complex patterns to be stored. This was the beginning of the 19th-century workers’ rebellions against what was eventually to become the computer. The Unmanned is an experiment with time: it puts forward a conception of history in which any exploration of the past is inevitably a transformation of the present, in which any search for the origins of what we are is intrinsically bound to an estrangement with regard to what we could be.”